A helpful addition!

Stacey has been cooking on a little borrowed table with a 2 burner propane stove on top for almost 2 years.  The time came to make the step up.  Our home improvements for this year are a basic concrete kitchen counter we made ourselves with a few blocks and concrete and…. an oven!  It’s a 4 burner propane with a small oven underneath!  Since then we have enjoyed cakes, brownies, cookies, transparent pie, quiche, baked chicken, pizza, and much more!  Our diet has changed! 

As always, with the purpose of demonstrating Asset Based Community Development Stacey is now in business.  With a little sign out front she now sells cakes/bread to the village.  Two assets/resources she brings to the table are the knowledge of baking and now the material necessity of the oven.  She continues to give classes to small groups of teenage girls for them to learn and in the hope to eventually turn the ¨mico-business¨ over to them.

 

Perhaps you would be surprised that what you consider a “poor” village that has a hard enough time getting the meals on the table could buy a cake.  Since birthday gifts are non-existent a food like tamales or cake is about the only way these families do celebrate birthdays or special occasions like Mother’s Day.  Stacey cranked out 4 cakes on Mother’s day.  It’s also something several people/families can pitch in and enjoy together.  It turns out sharing a cake is a great and special joy for these people.  One of the first things the girls from the youth group shared they wanted to learn was how to bake.  You never know what you’re end up using in life, thank Momma Reeder for teaching Stacey baking skills!

Between eating & selling the vegetables from the garden, small meat production with rabbits, our chickens laying eggs and fattening up, and now selling the cakes we are making strides to model sustainable practices in our life and find our way to make a small income on our own.  What we make from veggies and cakes is nothing through U.S. eyes and will never pay for insurance/etc. but by rural Honduran standards, it’s something.